


Boxes

by ShatteredLyre



Category: Shaman King
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Break Up, Comedy, F/M, Mistaken Identity, Older Characters, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-06-04
Packaged: 2017-11-06 21:17:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/423301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShatteredLyre/pseuds/ShatteredLyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hell hath no fury like a scorned, enraged, possibly massively homicidal woman. Namely, Kyoyama Anna. So how the hell did she end up engaged of all things? Mistaken identity, of course.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boxes

Kyoyama Anna did not get dumped. She was the one who broke up with others. Terminated the relationship with so much as a blink of an eye, batting of the eyelashes. Boom. Pow. Wham-bam-go-to-hell-ma'am. It's done. Over. She held hundreds of hearts in her hands, crushed thousands with her non-manicured-but-still-well-kept fingers, only pausing momentarily to wipe the blood of the broken vessel onto the shirt of the next sucker in line to be tossed to the side like trash.

Truth be told, break ups are just as hard for the one who does the dumping. The secret to Anna's success and seemingly unaffected exterior whenever the world (aka, Facebook) got wind of the death of her latest relationship? Boxes. Cardboard boxes. And a lot of them too. They were wonderful, they were cheap, they could be mass ordered, and best of all, they were recyclable (Anna did care about the earth and she found it rather unfair if the environment had to suffer just because her latest boyfriend was a top notch loser). Every time she started up a relationship, she pulled out a new box and set it up by her bedroom door in her apartment. Did her current boy take her out to the movies? Her ticket stub went into the box. Did he give her flowers? Into the box they go. Did he give her a stuffed animal (although this seems a little dated now that she had graduated from high school a number of years ago)? Hello, box. Jewelry, clothes, unopened candy, pictures, anything that she had received during her relationship went into the box.

And what exactly, pray tell, did she do with the boxes that kept her sane (or, to the common observer, cold, cruel, and heartless)? Well, if she felt that it was nearing the time to cutting the poor, unsuspecting boy loose, she would gather the box up, go over to his apartment when he was home and then promptly break up with him, shoving the box into his arms as she exited his life for the final time. (Because honestly, she saw the validity in mercy killing…just as with putting down a dog with a terminal disease, there was only so much whimpering and sad puppy eyes she could take before putting the relationship out of its misery and pain). She would then go home, delete all text messages she had received from him, delete all caller history, delete him from her contacts list, block him on all social networking sites, remove him from her email, instant messaging, _everything._ Just as if the relationship had never existed. Or, rather, scratch that, as if they had never met at all. She simply and rather cleanly snipped him out of her life along the perforated edges that guided her fiercely accurate and meticulous cuts that her boxes provided her. And then she crumpled up _that_ part of her life and threw it into the nearest waste basket. Gone. Poof. Who needs the past anyways?

They were nothing but blips on the radar until she found _him_. You know the one. _Him._ Not Mr. Right. Not Mr. Perfect. Not Mr. Prince Charming. Instead, Mr. Someone-Who-Can-Keep-Up-With-Anna. The one person whose box she would keep until he gave her a box of his own. Preferably containing dark colored velvet and a fourteen carat band with a single diamond of the highest clarity available on the commercial market (princess cut, of course, because, goddamnit, she _liked_ princess cut).

And in all honestly, she truly believed that she had found _him_ when she began dating that Asakura boy. She really, really did. But whether it worked out was another story completely.

So the rest of the world (aka, Facebook) informed her that she had been dumped by the Asakura boy when she logged on one morning and saw that she had exactly twenty-seven people consoling her, demanding to know what had happened, or both on her profile, four people privately messaging her, and eleven new IMs (not including email) that had a diverse variety of sad emoticon faces crying, frowning, or indignantly mad on the computer screen and several different ways of rearranging "Asakura," "kill," "will pay," "bastard," "asshole," "I'm here for you" and "don't worry."

Well.

This was…

All news to her.

What sparked the miniature scandal and what bloomed into one of the biggest topics of the university's gossip mill was the fact that who Anna had been dating for the past two years out of the blue changed his status from "In a Relationship with Kyoyama Anna" to "Single" and "It's Complicated with Marion Phauna" and was suddenly "Looking For: Dating, A Relationship, Random Play, Whatever I Can Get."

Oh. Em. Gee. He did _not_ just do that.

Anna refreshed the page only to see the congratulations of some of her best friends (yes, dear reader, the same ones that had been proclaiming that they would, like, _totally_ be there for her, girl!) gracing the "It's Complicated with Marion Phauna" bit on his page. "Yes…yes, he just did."

She was furious. Livid, really. Angry, enraged, hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-scorned-woman, all that jazz with a salad on the side, low fat dressing, please, to go.

But did she show it? Oh, hell no. She didn't. She was Kyoyama freakin' Anna! She did not take kindly to being slighted. She took even less kindly to being slighted in public without her knowledge while she was working the first shift in the coffee shop, thinking that she actually _knew_ her boyfriend of two years.

Anna frowned. "Apparently I don't."

The angry she-devil inside of her screamed for bloody murder. The calm, collected, ice-bitch-with-a-frigid-smile that everyone knew automatically thought of one thing. She whirled around in her computer chair so that she was facing her bedroom door.

Boxes.

She scooped up her box and marched out of her apartment. She marched down the stairs, through the common area (where she pretended she didn't see the entire room go silent and watch her with superficial sympathy), across campus where people literally froze in mid-air in their Frisbee games to catch a glimpse of Kyoyama in the aftermath, up the stairs of his apartment complex and knocked with her trademark three short, hard, demanding raps against the wooden door of the higher end, more expensive room.

She placed a hand on her hip, her patience dangerously close to boiling over before she took a chainsaw to the owner of the slowest moving feet on the planet that was taking his sweet, sweet time in answering the door as she heard footsteps approaching. She pursed her lips. Taking a chainsaw to the entire apartment complex…

No. Wait.

To the entire university. Yes, taking a chainsaw and perhaps a flamethrower to every member of the university wouldn't hurt either.

She shifted the box from her left side to her right. Well, it wouldn't hurt…for her, that is.

She heard the owner of the slowest moving feet on the planet leisurely unlatch the top lock…then the middle lock…then the third to the bottom lock…then the second to the…

Perhaps in addition to her death by flamethrower and chainsaw assault on everyone she knew, maybe she could also procure a couple of lions to…you know…

…devour the corpses she left in her wake. And then she'd behead the creepy Mari because, to be quite frank, she never did like the girl. Ever. Maybe she could learn to even like Mari…once her head was thoroughly detached from her body, of course.

The final lock was finally unlatched and the door swung open, revealing her very contented looking, very relaxed boyfriend. Anna mentally corrected herself. _Ex-boyfriend who apparently cheated on me with Marion Phauna of all people despite the fact that she still plays with dolls._ A thousand dirty things flooded her mind as her brain, against her will of course, visualized what exactly had transpired between the blond girl and her _ex-_ boyfriend the night prior. _Ew. Stop that._

"You. Bastard." She slapped him right across the face, taking perverse pleasure from the nice, rich, full ringing sound that her hand generated when it came into contact with his stupid smiling face. She then glared at him, using her trademark Kyoyama glare (copyright pending) that sent full grown men slinking into psychiatric wards with their tails between their legs and their feelings left rather hurt indeed.

She then dropped the box onto the floor and kicked it so that it went sailing, two years filled with gifts and memories and lies spilling out and over its edges as it completed its airborne arc. "I don't ever want to see your face again."

"Um…" Anna, surprised by the tone and uncertainty in his voice, paused in her dramatic, grand exit, something she had never _ever_ done before in her entire life and her weakness made her want to vomit and she continued storming out. Well, she had _intended_ on continuing storming out if he hadn't interrupted her yet again. "I think you got the wrong person."

Her eyes widened and she whirled around. " _What_ are you _talking_ —" And then her jaw fell slack. "Oh."

"You were probably looking for my roommate."

"Oh."

"Er, well, I mean, brother. Heh, it's kinda weird since I didn't really know that I had a brother for the longest time until recently—"

"Oh."

"So to me he's more like my roommate to me at the moment. Well, uh, yeah…I guess it's okay. It's an understandable misunderstanding, you know?"

"Oh."

"Since we're identical twins and all."

"Oh."

"I'm…uh…I'm Yoh by the way."

"Oh."

He extended a hand and after a few moments seeing that Anna was _clearly_ in a state in which she was unable to think, function, or comprehend anything whatsoever (what with the complete lack of color in her complexion, dilated pupils, rigid spine and body, etc), retracted his hand and shoved it back into his pocket.

"Er...Are you—"

Anna had somehow managed to snap back to her old self. "Well. Shit." She crossed her arms in front of herself, clearly shooting him a glare that blamed him for the entire encounter. She cleared her throat. "I'm—"

"Kyoyama Anna. Yeah, I know."

She narrowed her eyes. No one, and she would like to repeat, _no one_ had ever interrupted her before. Not even Hao.

"I mean, everyone on campus knows you and you went out with Hao and all for like two years…not that either of those really explains why I know you considering I just transferred here a couple of weeks ago and that I just found out that I even _had_ a brother and…"

Anna studied him as he continued rambling on, a habit that he seemed rather fond of. And it just completely floored her as to how she had mistaken this…this…this _Yoh_ character for Hao. His hair was much shorter, he donned a pair of bright orange headphones (how those had escaped Anna's attention a few minutes earlier was beyond her), he wore casual clothes that bordered on the slovenly side (quite different from Hao's penchant for dress shirts and sharply creased edges or the occasional leather jacket that Anna had vehemently detested in disgusted silence), and just… _him_ with his constant smile and sunny mood and relaxed tone and posture…so...

Different.

"…it just surprised me, is all," he said, laughing and ending his long monologue which Anna hadn't paid attention to in the slightest.

She shot him yet another look that meant something along the lines of _Well-excuse-me-did-I-hurt-your-poor-little-feelings?_

He shrugged. "I guess you did hurt my feelings if you want to phrase it that way…"

Well. _Shit_. He could even _decipher_ what Anna's glares meant. Of course, people reacted in the way they always did: able to extrapolate the general meaning of her glare but never, ever, _ever_ their very specific meaning which usually mirrored what she was thinking. Not even _Hao_ , her longest relationship, could accurately translate what her glares meant. At least, not this well. This caused Anna's eyebrows to arch up to heights that her eyebrows had never arched up to before (this day was quite full of firsts for Anna).

"…considering that I like you."

She blinked. "That's…rather forward. And please, do tell, Mr. Asakura, how on earth do you like me? Considering that you just moved here a couple of weeks ago and didn't even know of my existence until say..." She whipped out her cellphone at break neck speed. "About seven minutes, twenty-three seconds, and five milliseconds ago...but then again, that's just a rough estimate."

He smiled and shrugged again. "I dunno. I just decided right now."

"That you like me?"

"Yup." He nodded.

Anna will never know how she made it back to her apartment with his number written on a piece of cardboard Yoh had ripped off of her box that she had dropkicked earlier. She will never know how their first conversation ended because she was in such a state of shock from how Yoh kept surprising her.

But what she _does_ know is that she did in fact call that number he had scrawled on a piece of cardboard. She _does_ know that they had many other conversations. She _does_ know that Hao's volatile relationship status fluctuated rather violently for the entire virtual world to see before he himself exploded and set fire to one of the university buildings, prompting his expulsion. Oh, and Mari left him. She _does_ know that after two years and a day of dating, she packed up her cardboard box for Yoh and put it into his closet (since, well, they moved in together) and in exchange he gave her a box of his own. A box containing dark colored velvet and a fourteen carat band with a single diamond of the highest clarity available on the commercial market.

Princess cut, of course.

* * *


End file.
